Welcome to Whitken & Co.! We are a design studio and lifestyle blog based in Anderson, SC. Our goal is to help you create a beautiful functional, and healing home for you and your family to live, work, play in, and share with others.

Have you ever thought about what a weird thing family can be sometimes? I mean, there’s these people that you’re related to, but you never actually talk to or see until someone gets married or dies, and than you’re thrown into each other’s life for a couple of hours or a day or two, and it’s kind of weird.

I mean you don’t hardly know them and they hardly know you, but when you show up in the same place for some family event there’s this connection. A lot of times they remember you running around in a diaper with snot hanging out your nose, and you don’t remember them at all. But you all start swapping the latest news on each other. They ask you all about your life and tell you all about their kids. They tell you their stories about how they use to steal your great-grandmother’s cigarettes and go smoke out in the pasture when they were a kid, and you tell them how you used to watch wrestling with her and how she threatened you and your brother with a switching if you didn’t put the toys up when she said to. And to all the family that doesn't show up, well, it's open season. You just never know what stories are going to be shared about you and what laughs are going to be shared at your expense. It’s a strange thing—family.

No matter who you meet in this world, where you go, or what you do, when you come together after years apart, you find a bond there that you just don’t find with anyone else. I don’t know if it’s just the knowledge that you’re blood kin, or the family history you share, or the commonalities you discover in each other, but It’s weird and it’s wonderful.

Below is a pic from this past weekend of some of our family that we've long timed no see'd. (And yes, I did just make those words up). It was definitely a pleasure, and I hope we don't wait so long next time to see each other.